Electronic mail (or email) and its more recent derivative text messaging have become an integral part of people's daily personal and professional lives. Serving as a communication mode between letters and phone calls, emails are widely used for all kinds of communication purposes. One of the useful features of email is that it can be addressed to multiple recipients at the same time and a chain of email exchanges can be preserved in each message. On the other hand, the same features may also result in an overload of communication simply by their number and size.
Email centric organizations tend to communicate very heavily in email. Many of these organizations rely on “Distribution Lists”, or groups of people in a directory, as a recipient of their emails. This may cause a large amount of email traffic to and from these groups. Since all of this traffic is delivered to a user's inbox, this may result in overwhelming the user through an extraordinary amount of emails in their inbox.
Modern communication systems have a large number of capabilities including integration of various communication modalities with different services. For example, instant messaging, voice/video communications, data/application sharing, white-boarding, and other forms of communication may be employed to facilitate communications between groups of users providing paths for exchanging information in addition to email.